The Savannah-Chatham County Public School System (SCCPSS) is Georgia’s 10th largest, and over time its yearly budgets have increased… and so have the number of school administrators.
As for the number of teachers and students, well, those numbers have actually decreased.
Are you confused?
In case you were wondering, no, people aren’t fleeing the county. It’s quite the opposite. Per census data, the county’s population has increased 16% since 2010.
So what precisely is happening?
County resident David Little said he homeschools his children, but as a taxpayer he takes a keen interest in how SCCPSS spends his money.
“We have a bucketload of private schools here because the public school system is failing,” Little said.
“The real issue [with the school system] is not about its revenue. The real issue is its spending.”
SCCPSS has a new board member, Stephanie Campbell. Campbell labels herself a conservative, but she asks that no one “put [her] in an [ideological] box.”
“I am four months in and want to build relationships and make sure I am taken seriously by my fellow board members,” Campbell said.
In four months, Campbell said she’s analyzed much about SCCPSS, especially its budget.
And after seeing those records, she said she has questions that are too urgent to go unanswered.
POVERTY AND LITERACY
According to census data, Chatham County has a median household income of $69,575 and a per capita income of $38,920. Exactly 15.2% of county residents live in poverty.
That’s higher than the U.S. poverty rate, which, in 2023, was 11.1%.
“We have a high poverty district with pockets of affluence,” Campbell said.
Title I schools receive federal funding to support students from low-income families.
According to the SCCPSS website, the system has 60 schools. Thirty-eight of them are Title I, according to the district.
At an SCCPSS budget workshop in April, board member David Bringman said the school system’s spending priorities go beyond merely teaching basics like reading, writing and arithmetic.
“Our mission is to do the education side of the thing, but public schools became a panacea for all of the other things that we need to do in a community when it comes to things like mental health, feeding and transporting,” Bringman said.
And then there’s the matter of literacy scores.
Campbell said “key indicators from students in the district’s third, fifth and eighth grades” reveal much room for improvement.
Beth Majeroni is a retired reading recovery teacher from Virginia who now lives in Chatham County. She said she takes a special interest in SCCPSS.
“[Without literacy], students will never get a job that is of any paying capacity,” Majeroni said.
“You cannot do anything in life without reading. It is your ticket to freedom and being prosperous in life. That is where our effort and money must be in those early years between kindergarten through the second grade.”
FEWER TEACHERS, FEWER STUDENTS
SCCPSS, according to records, had 38,032 students during the 2014-2015 school year. For the current 2024-2025 year, the number of students tallies at 35,428.
As stated, Chatham County’s population has increased. According to 2010 census data, the county had 265,128 residents. Currently, that number is 307,336.
“Our population has gone up significantly,” Campbell said.
“The fact that our school enrollment hasn’t grown [as our population has] is pretty telling.”
Campbell said many parents take advantage of the county’s “high-density population of private schools.”
Campbell and Majeroni both said SCCPSS has fewer teachers than prior years, but that merely reflects a nationwide trend.
“Teachers are not getting the discipline support they need to truly teach. There’s more pressure on teachers when it comes to test scores. People don’t want to go into the profession, and, consequently, there are fewer teachers to pull from,” Majeroni said.
“They don’t enjoy teaching because they can’t teach. It is really just crowd control in many cases. Fewer people are going into education because of the salary and because of what they are hearing [from people already teaching]. There’s too much of a time commitment to fill out forms. There’s an increase in administrators. Everybody wants a report. Everybody wants information.”
And, despite the school system not having the best academic outcomes, Majeroni said teachers are held accountable every passing year by more and more administrators.
Bringman was asked to comment.
When in-person classes resumed following the COVID-19 pandemic, classroom behavior “became an issue” nationwide, Bringman said.
“It’s a harder environment to teach in,” Bringman said.
For this reason, among others, Majeroni said “teachers would love to get out of their classrooms and into administration.”
“It’s [in administration] where they make more money,” Majeroni said.
“Their pensions are based on [what they make before they retire]. So why not go to the place that makes them more money where they are not in classrooms and don’t have to deal with the discipline problems, the problems that no one supports them on?”
HOW MANY MORE SCHOOL ADMINISTRATORS ARE THERE?
According to the Minnesota-based Center of the American Experiment, “the number of district administrators in U.S. public schools has grown 87.6%% between 2000 and 2019 compared to student growth at 7.6% and teacher growth at 8.7%.”
Going by her numbers, Campbell said general SCCPSS administrators increased in number from 26 in the year 2015 to at least 108 in the present year.
“That increase is obscene,” Campbell said.
“Why has that gone up four times when we don’t have an increased bulk of students?”
According to SCCPSS, the number of school administrators exceeds what Campbell stated and actually totals 136. They include 51 principals, one K-8 school director, and 76 assistant principals.
When asked about this, Bringman said the increased number is driven by federal mandates.
“There are a lot of federal things that come down to the state, and then the state pushes them out. They include things for special education, like 504s and IEPs. Those all require administrators,” Bringman said.
“There are a lot more things that you have to keep up with. State-mandated things. We have a whole heck of a lot more people to manage, plus 55 buildings.”
Majeroni said SCCPSS schools need administrators… but perhaps not so many.
“What you really need is two teachers in at least kindergarten through second grade for literacy needs,” Majeroni said.
“You would need two teachers to shore up the reading proficiency for the early readers. If your reading is not good by the end of the second grade then you are on the path to be a candidate that might not make it through school. Having two teachers in a classroom at those early levels would be a better use of funds.”
THE SPENDING
According to SCCPSS records, for the 2014-2015 school year, the adopted budget for all funds was slightly more than $496 million. For the 2024-2025 school year that amount is almost $885 million.
“COVID gets cited for a lot of things. The cost of building schools went up tremendously, especially for a period of time,” Campbell said.
This, at the same time enrollment declined and, as Campbell added, budget numbers “outpaced inflation.”
As for yearly costs-per-student, for the 2014-2015 school year, that amount was $10,205. For the 2024-2025 school year, it’s about $20,000.
But, as SCCPSS Budget Director Paige Cooley said at the recent budget workshop, once you omit federal funding for food services for free and reduced lunches, unspecified state grants, and federal COVID-19 relief funding then the costs-per-student are much lower.
With money only from local and state general funds, the cost-per-pupil is $13,529, Cooley added.
As reported in January, SCCPSS was approved for $216 million in COVID-19 relief money.
“We received an extraordinary amount of money compared to some of the other districts surrounding us. That has made our amounts look very high in recent years. We have a very large Title I population. The CARES/ESSER [COVID-19 relief] funds were tied to Title I. That’s how they determine how much your district received,” Cooley said, adding SCCPSS is “finishing up the last bit” of those funds.
At that meeting, Campbell asked Cooley for a revised yearly cost-per-pupil, one that doesn’t consider COVID-19 funding. Such an estimate, however, was unavailable.
According to the SCCPSS Fiscal Year 2025 budget, the district got nearly $18.5 million in COVID-19 relief money and $33.3 million for food services, totaling nearly $52 million. When you take that number and divide it by the current number of students then that is only a $1,460 per student deduction, meaning the cost-per-pupil could be about $18,540.
During that same meeting, Superintendent Denise Watts, who was not available for an interview, addressed per-pupil costs.
“Our per-pupil investment is greater because the board and the community have made decisions to support things that take into account poverty and student complexity, such as a nurse at every school,” Watts said.
“We have chosen to do that. It is a great investment.”
ESPLOST
In March, voters renewed a one-cent Education Special Purpose Local Option (ESPLOST) sales tax. Voters approved the first ESPLOST in 2006.
Proceeds pay to renovate existing schools and also to construct new ones. Those funds also pay for school buses and to pay off debt for capital projects. SCCPSS may not use that money to pay teacher salaries, instructional materials or utility bills.
As the Savannah Morning News reported late last year, board members preferred to hold the election not in November, when voter turnout was high, but instead in March — when fewer voters go to the polls.
The Savannah Morning News reported that ESPLOST was a stand-alone ballot item.
Board member Cornelia Hall reportedly said, “with regard to ESPLOST, that lower voter turnout often resulted in a higher percentage of yes votes.”
“The logic implies that if voters are not showing up to vote on other measures in March, then the majority of those who do make the effort to turnout are in favor of it,” the paper said.
In that election, only 12,259 out of 211,005 registered voters cast their ballots.
TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE
Bringman said SCCPSS officials are assembling a literacy task force.
“We were teaching, and teachers were being taught to teach in ways that were found to not teach people how to read,” Bringman said, without elaborating.
At the April budget workshop, Watts said she intends to survey the community about ways to spend taxpayer money “wisely and strategically.”
“I am looking to bring on a third party to do a deep dive into our finances so that we can understand where we are and be better positioned to move into the future,” Watts said.
Cambell says Watts, who assumed office in 2023, is a “reasonable and transparent” superintendent while Majeroni said Watts cares about raising the school system’s literacy rates.
[Improvements, including literacy] will be difficult,” Majeroni said.
“Doing so is not a sprint at this point. It is a marathon.”